Roaming traffic contributes a significant percentage of an operator's revenue and even a better percentage of the operator's margin. With increasing competition and regulatory control, operators are being more pressured to increase their roaming revenue and reduce roaming margin losses. They need keep a check on roaming quality and fraud control at both, own networks to serve inbound roamers and roaming partner networks to serve outbound roamers, that can directly impact an operator's roaming revenue and margin.
Establishing roaming relationships is essential for operators to achieve roaming revenue in the first place. Such process involves both inbound and outbound roaming tests. These tests are usually only performed prior to the launch of these roaming relationships. However, roaming partners may constantly change network configuration, upgrade new software, add new number ranges, introduce new inter-connection routing or add new network elements. These changes or incomplete or incorrect execution of changes could affect roaming services. Constantly maintaining roaming quality of the services thus will help increase roaming revenue. Also, while roaming represents a substantial revenue source for the operators, it is also subjected to frauds like Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) box and interconnection frauds.
Further, many operators may employ aggressive and innovative services for increasing roaming revenue. However, these services may have detrimental effects on roaming partners. Thus, early detection of these services can help roaming partners to play defenses and retain roaming revenue. Some of the exemplary roaming services are outbound traffic redirection (i.e., steering of traffic (SoR)) that allows a home operator to direct its outbound roaming traffic towards preferred operators with better Inter-Operator Tariff (IOT), discounts or group alliance relationship. Another innovative service is detecting home operator's traffic redirection (Anti-SoR) solution that arms a visited operator against such attack and allows retaining its inbound roamers within its own network. Yet another innovative service will arm a home operator against the Anti-SoR by a visited network and hence protect its outbound roaming revenue. Also, another service provides inbound SoR capability to a visited operator to retain the inbound roamers within its network.
A co-related service to anti-traffic steering is the use of Gateway Location Register (GLR) by a Visited Public Mobile Network (VPMN). Still another innovative way to increase roaming revenue is network extension which allows a client operator to piggyback a host operator's roaming relationships. Yet another innovative way to increase roaming revenue is home routing which allows a Home Public Mobile Network (HPMN) outbound roamer's non-HPMN international calls to be routed via the HPMN to gain mobile termination or international termination revenue due to arbitrage. Still another innovative way to increase roaming revenue (or margin) or reduce roaming cost is optimal routing to voicemail (or late call forwarding) which allows an unanswered call to the HPMN outbound roamer to be optimally routed to the HPMN voicemail without tromboning.
One of the existing solutions that addresses some of these above mentioned issues is to deploy remote probes (real or virtual mobile stations) around the world. When a remote probe behaves like a virtual mobile station, a virtual SIM is dynamically slotted in from a central multiplexer of real SIMs to test different types of subscribers for different types of services under some kinds of schedules. When a remote probe is a real mobile station, then real or virtual SIMs can be inserted for testing purpose. However, there are several issues with the remote probes approach. First is coverage, as despite of increasing coverage in multiple countries and major cities, this approach does not assure covering of home operator's roamer's services in the part that are not covered by these remote probes. The coverage problem also applies to a visiting operator for inbound roamers when the country's expanse is huge such as China, India etc. Moreover, the operator often cannot afford to continuously test its inbound roaming service availability to accommodate constant changes of network infrastructures including network elements (e.g. VLR/VMSCs) and routing. Another drawback is cost as remote probe vendors need ways to recuperate the cost (e.g. remote probe hardware cost, data center collocation cost including bandwidth and maintenance etc.) for the vast amount of investment for extended coverage. Also, without enough coverage, some SIM box frauds might not be detected. Further, even testing any kind of subscriber (e.g. prepaid, postpaid, Virtual Private Network (VPN), machine-to-machine etc.) is done by providing the corresponding SIM card to the test vendor. It is unlikely that they will multiply the number of test scenarios by the number of profiles because of the costs of these tests, thus making it is hard for the operator to control the quality of service offered to any of the subscribers. Also, due to its lack of network signaling, remote probe approach is also not quite effective in detecting various revenue affecting services like mentioned above. Further, in terms of providing revenue assurance, owing to the constant changes in IOT tariffs and constant upgrades of billing systems, constant regression tests can help reduce these revenue leaks. However, since remote probes are bottlenecked by their coverage area, unfortunately many countries that are out of the coverage cannot gain benefit of these tests. Further, remote probe approach cannot test for operator/network initiated services such as on-demand Operator Determined Barring (ODB), Cancel Location, InSertSusbcriberData (ISD), Immediate Service Termination (IST) and on-demand profile changes. Furthermore, lack of network side signaling and monitoring also make it less diagnostic on the failure causes and less ideal in operational management of subscriber profiles.
Another alternative solution is to monitor just the roaming links at the home/host operator. The solution is completely network based without involvement of mobile stations (local or remote). In this way, many types of inbound roaming and outbound roaming Transaction Capabilities Application Part (TCAP) signaling messages can be probed at the operator network. However, this approach is unable to find out whether outbound roamers can perform Mobile originated (MO) or forwarded calls for non-Customized Applications for Mobile Network Enhanced Logic (CAMEL) agreement networks. Further, it is unable to perform revenue assurance tests without real roamer usage. Also, this approach is unable to know if any potential problems exist at the visiting network elements. This approach is also unable to test or discover failures on Supplementary Services (SS) and home-operator/network initiated services. Further, this approach cannot detect frauds like SIM box proactively.
Another alternative is to just test Signaling Connection Control Part (SCCP) routing from home operator to the roaming. Because no profile is assumed or created, such an approach is rather limited because it cannot test behaviors on roaming calls, SS, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), CAMEL and SS profiles. Also, such an approach cannot detect roaming and interworking services, quality, network capabilities and international frauds.
In accordance with the foregoing, there is a need in the art of a system, a method, and a computer product for creating a single operator and pure network based solution that gives the operator intelligence to deal with above mentioned problems.